Infinidat Hires Former Arrow ECS Exec As New Channel Chief

Petabyte-scale storage developer Infinidat has hired a former national sales director from Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions as its new channel chief.

Mitch Diodato, who this month was named as Infinidat's director of North American channel sales, brings to the Waltham, Mass.-based 20 years of IT and storage experience. At Arrow ECS, Diodato managed the IBM group field sales organization and worked with the Centennial, Colo.-based distributor's channel partners.

The appointment of Diodato to run North American channel sales comes just month or so after Infinidat unveiled Hanan Altif as its new channel director for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa).

Infinidat develops the petabyte-scale, all-flash InfiniBox data storage systems, which the company said provides sub-millisecond latency, high reliability and hyper-scale capacity at a lower total cost of ownership than traditional storage technologies. In October the company raised $95 million in Series C funding, bringing the startup's valuation to $1.6 billion.

Infinidat was founded in 2011 by Moshe Yanai, a long-time storage developer who before founding the company managed the development of EMC's Symmetrix line in the late 1980s, and then left to start an Israel-based company, XIV, which was then sold to IBM in 2008.

The privately-held company has enjoyed good growth. In August, Infinidat said its customers purchased 156 petabytes of capacity from the company in the second quarter of 2017, and that its sales grew 250 percent that quarter compared to its second quarter of 2016.

Infinidat did not reply to a request for additional comment.

However, Diodato said in a statement that he is glad to be joining Infinidat during a time of growth for the company.

"It is an exciting time for the IT industry and the storage sector in particular," Diodato said. "Companies are hungry for solutions that enable them to accelerate their growth in the digital domain, and understanding how Infinidat rises to that challenge creates an incredible opportunity for our current and future channel partners and their customers."

The Infinidat channel program is similar to that of leading manufacturers, and the company has a history of working with people who have a lot of industry and channel experience, said Vincent Chang, president of Arrosoft, an Iselin, N.J.-based solution provider and Infinidat channel partner.

"Infinidat has learned all the right lessons, good and bad, in the channel," Chang told CRN.

"You can't do enterprise storage without a solid channel," he said. "Diodato should be a good fit at Infinidat. This move opens things up for Infinidat a bit, and brings the company a great new perspective."